Looking for leverage where tech intersects business
With the announcement earlier this week of its new IaaS partner ecosystem, it appears that Dell has gotten out of the business of directly providing public cloud IaaS services itself. While Dell still may eventually return with its own OpenStack based offering, it appears it’s out of the public cloud IaaS game for now. With [...]
Transformation is not a new concept, and has been around a long time before cloud and big data. It has always been a pretty nebulous term, but generally has referred to the fundamental reinvention or redesign of a business or function. From an enterprise-wide perspective this typically has meant redefining everything from target markets, products and [...]
In the last several months, interest in the concept of cloud brokerage has been growing and was recently punctuated by Accenture’s announced intention to be the IT industry “cloud broker” as part of a larger $400 million cloud R&D investment. While the concept of a cloud brokerage has been around awhile, enterprise adoption is finally catching [...]
The announcement last week that GE (yes that GE) made a $105 million investment in the Pivotal Initiative caught many by surprise. Not only was it strange to see GE make a large direct investment in a technology vendor, it was also odd to see it in a relatively immature market like PaaS. So the [...]
The conventional thinking about business-led adoption of cloud services in the enterprise goes something like this: Frustrated by a non-responsive IT organization, business users become attracted to the innovation, speed, and flexibility offered by cloud vendors and solutions Fearing loss of control, corporate IT puts the brakes on deployments and projects of which they become [...]
Microsoft last week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may [...]
Now that corporate IT is finally taking cloud seriously, we’re starting to see development of more explicit enterprise-wide “cloud strategies”. Whether driven internally or with the help of external consultants, many of these take familiar IT strategy development processes and direct them at cloud. Here are some common pitfalls we’re seeing with many of these [...]
It was an interesting week last week at Cloud Connect Silicon Valley. In addition to the keynotes and track sessions, we also saw the release of the summary results of the latest joint Cloud Connect / Everest Group survey on enterprise cloud adoption. Here are the seven things we took away from the conference, the [...]
In 1939, the world plunged into the Second World War, lasting the better part of six years. All the major powers of the time were involved. Numerous fronts opened up, with large campaigns in Asia, Africa, Europe, and skirmishes even in the Americas. In the end, the victors set the policies that directed world affairs [...]
One of the more interesting corners of the enterprise market where cloud is starting to drive real disruption and transformation is in the call center. Call center environments are comprised of a variety of systems including interactive voice response (IVRs), automatic call distributors (ACDs), outbound dialers and other components that have traditionally been provided by [...]
When you ask people, “What is are the biggest benefits of cloud computing?” you’re likely to get a couple top answers: reduced IT costs and increased business agility. But when you probe people beyond that, asking them, “How does cloud computing help with those things?” the conversation quickly turns mushy.
Saving money is nothing compared to beating your competitors to market with a better product. This is the revelation that’s rapidly taking hold in the enterprise CIO’s office. Until very recently, most enterprise IT leaders would tell you that their primary goal in moving to cloud computing was related to cost reduction, primarily through server [...]
In one of the more eye-opening recent announcements in the world of enterprise cloud, JPMorgan Chase said last week that it has migrated nearly all of its internal .NET and Java applications to a PaaS model. Over 430 development teams, 2,000 applications and 4 data centers are now in production in a PaaS environment delivered by Apprenda. It [...]
You may recall we talked about Toyota in an earlier post about their impressive use of cloud services to drive back-office transformation. We’d like to shift gears (pun intended) to the front-office to talk about how Toyota is using cloud to transform the customer service experience and how it engages with its customers. Toyota’s vision [...]
Rackspace took quite a beating last week after announcing on Tuesday that cloud revenue growth appears to be decelerating. The stock ended up down nearly 20%, reflecting the fact that Wall Street expectations for growth were high. Rackspace is actually one of the few vendors that makes cloud services growth numbers public, making them subject [...]
When it comes to enterprise cloud and sources of business value, the discussion typically focuses on business agility, flexibility and cost efficiency. One of the most powerful, yet unsung ways that cloud is actually driving enterprise-class business value in practice is through standardization and simplification. In fact some of the most compelling business cases seen [...]
How do cloud computing, big data, and other “agile” technologies improve business agility? Why, “Automation!” of course. That’s part of it, but you’re missing the biggest gains.
A wide array of players is aggressively attacking the enterprise cloud infrastructure services market. The competitive landscape includes providers from a variety of backgrounds, including hosting companies such as Rackspace, GoGrid, and Tier3; telcos such as AT&T, Verizon, Telstra, and BT; and legacy enterprise IT service providers such as IBM, HP, CSC, and Dell. They’re [...]
Flexible, consumption –based pricing models in most cases make cloud services economically and financially attractive to CFOs. The ability to get IT “off the balance sheet” through subscription-based services is seen as a big positive for cloud migration from a financial point of view. Despite this apparent advantage, there are cases where financial factors can [...]
For many enterprises the cost to operate and maintain complex ERP systems consumes a large part of the IT budget. Given security and application performance requirements, you wouldn’t think that ERP would be on the top of the CIO’s list for cloud migration. Domino Sugar thought otherwise, and successfully migrated their SAP ERP environment to [...]
